governance

Access to Foursquare's "check-in" app has been blocked in China, the mobile networking service confirmed with CNET on Friday.

Rumors began to circle about the ban early Friday when tweets and blog posts from Chinese Foursquare users indicated that they could not access the service.

Foursquare is still looking into the issue, co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai told CNET. Namely, they aren't sure whether this will be a permanent block or temporary. But it appears to be linked to the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 1989 incident in which the Chinese military … Read more

Did you renew your driver's license or pay your last parking ticket online? If so, you're part of a growing number of people in the U.S. taking advantage of government services on the Internet.

A poll of more then 2,000 American adults late last year found that 82 percent of Internet users, or 61 percent of all U.S. adults, looked up information or made a transaction on a government Web site in the past year. The results of the poll, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and released Tuesday, also discovered that … Read more

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York has come out swinging against new announcements by Facebook that modify how much member data is shared with third-party companies, suggesting that the Federal Trade Commission needs to promptly address the issue of social-network privacy.

A press release from Schumer's office announced that he has written to the FTC to ask that the agency "examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to ensure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information...(and) provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user … Read more

Last summer, not long after the U.S. government began a review of how piracy affects consumers and the nation's economy, the feds went to the major movie studios for help.

Representatives from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress' investigative arm, asked the studios for information about a survey the studios had commissioned (PDF) that concluded piracy and counterfeiting cost the film industry $6.1 billion in 2005.

But the GAO never got all of the information it requested from the Motion Picture Association of America, according to GAO administrators, including Loren Yager, the author of the summary report … Read more

The iPad might be a fine alternative to a laptop for simple tasks, but can it really be relied upon to run an entire country? Norway Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg certainly thinks so.

Stoltenberg--stranded in New York City because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland entering European airspace and disrupting travel--has been using the iPad to get his daily work done, according to a CNN report. The network said that it spoke with the prime minister, who said it's business as usual for his government.

"It's very normal for a prime minister to travel abroad, so this … Read more

As the United States continues to struggle with its deficit, a task force created by President Obama to address the situation may be turning to Microsoft to inform the public about the difficulties of balancing a federal budget.

According to USA Today, Erskine Bowles, head of the Obama administration's budget-balancing task force, has contacted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to see whether the company could build a video game designed to allow gamers "to take a stab at balancing the budget."

Details on the title are few and far between. Although it sounds like it will be Web-based, … Read more

After spending a year studying how piracy and illegal counterfeiting affects the United States, the Government Accountability Office says it still doesn't know for sure.

Congress tasked the GAO in April 2009 with reviewing the efforts to quantify the size and scope of piracy, including the impacts of Web piracy to the film and music industries. In a 32-page report issued Monday, the GAO said most of the published information, anecdotal evidence, and records show that piracy is a drag on the U.S. economy, tax revenue, and in some cases potentially threatens national security and public health. But … Read more

By the end of my interview with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, I found myself wondering if he had any idea how important his agency's role would be in this Internet era. After all, his office now touches just about everything of interest to tech and Internet enthusiasts, from national broadband speeds to wireless exclusivity contracts to regulating video content on the Internet and on television. We spoke, in the 25 minutes or so he had available, primarily about the National Broadband Plan, which is the office's 370-page announcement that it intends to bring the American broadband infrastructure, costs, … Read more

President Obama broke the Internet's collective heart last week, cheering on strict intellectual-property laws, dampening our hopes for meaningful copyright reforms and, worse, announcing that "we must" move forward on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Now, ACTA covers a lot of ground that the president is concerned about, such as physical copying of goods--the actual counterfeiting in the Counterfeiting name. But as you may know by now, it also contains some seriously disturbing, broad-stroke IP law that could have a devastating effect on the way the Internet works--on research, content creation and innovation, search and seizure, and much … Read more